Robinson Crusoe is stranded on a remote, uninhabited island off the coast of Venezuela, near the mouth of the Orinoco River in the Caribbean Sea.

Quick Scoop: Where Was Robinson Crusoe Stranded?

In Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe’s ship is blown off course during a storm and wrecked on a desert island in the Caribbean. The text locates this island near the mouth of the Orinoco River, placing it off the northern coast of South America, in what is now understood as Venezuelan waters.

Some readers today associate “Robinson Crusoe Island” with a real island in the Juan Fernández archipelago off Chile, renamed in the 1960s, but that Pacific island is linked to the historical sailor Alexander Selkirk, not the fictional Crusoe’s actual setting in the novel.